"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"- HARRY SMITH
........................"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"-ROBERT HERRICK

Friday, October 16, 2015

Out now, A Rest Before The Walk, a new album by Keith Seatman - CD purchasable at the Ghost Box Shop and from Monday, available via Bandcamp in digital and compact disc form.

Set and setting:

‘’From the Old Road take the track to Sidebottom Fold Farm at the foot of Wild Bank; through the gate and into the field, under the pylon that fizzes and crackles loudly on rainy days, up to where the heather (thick with flies in late summer) begins. Over the dry stone wall and left along the rutted path to the disused rifle range with its raised banks and collapsing concrete bunkers; a bleak, melancholy place that is gradually being reclaimed by the land. Corroded round casings are still plentiful, embedded in the sandy earth, even though generations of children have collected them by the handful.’’

‘’We walk at different rates, often suggested by location, terrain, need and ability. We move about our homes at a particular ‘indoor’ pace, but there are interior spaces such as hospital corridors and station concourses that invite an outdoor rhythm and speed.’’

’To an extent all our walks are coloured by a degree of prior knowledge and awareness. Some locations and the routes we take are however so heavily loaded with particular memories or associations that our experience is profoundly affected by them.’’Extracts from ‘Walk’ 2015 by Greg Palmer. Artist and Associate Lecturer on the B.A. (Hons) Fine Art course at Southampton Solent University & the M.A. Illustration course at Kingston University.Tracklist for A Rest Before The WalkWe all had our Dreams, Strange Tales & Lost Paper Trails, There’s Something Outside, Once More with the Whirligig, Broken Folk*, Made by Sun and Ice,Race you to the Top, Thinking Doing and Moving, My Morning Ritual*, I Wish I Wish I Wish, Waiting for Mr Fieldpole, Sun in Her Hand,Along the Corridor 1st on the Left Room 2882, A Rest Before the WalkContributors to the process include North Devon Singer Songwriter Douglas E Powell (vocals, lyrics, sound-foraging. hospitality) and Jim Jupp (co-production) hear excerpts here^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In other news....Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's ...The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971.. is due in a fortnight from the label Helen Scarsdale. As discussed at Include Me Out - "the past in a state of decay, plunderphonics from genre films of the 1970s, but it's unlikely you will recognise the sources, so scrambled are the sounds...beautifully so, you might say, but this beauty is one of course textures from salvaged celluloid ...voices cut, rewound, repeated...a seance in sound..." - available here from October 30th

Set and Setting"An enigmatic cartel of urban spelunkers, ruinous sound ecologists and earnest refuseniks, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project began its collective service in the 1986. Film, sound installation, and audio recordings have all been part of their broader agenda, all of which falls under a wholly unified aesthetic. Their's is a post-industrial model, sifting detritus from the wastelands located in Midwestern rust-belt communities shuddering in the downward spiral of economic demise. Upon the re-assembly of these materials -- often culled from 35mm film and 1/4" magnetic tape found in abandoned drive-in movie theatres and warehouses -- the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project interweave with ready-mades of their own disintegration. At this site of cultural and anthropological research, forgotten memes and planned obsolesce begin to map previously hidden routes through the psychological and existential landscape of the American psyche -- past, present, and future. Over the years, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project has collaborated with :zoviet*france: -- the semi-anonymous cabal of pseudo-ethnomusicologists into our pre-apocalyptic past that could easily be seen as Fossil Aerosol's British counterpart. With The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project reconstitutes dissociated fragments from nearly-lost genre films of the 1970s, filtered by scratched celluloid, bad splices, dropouts, and damaged control tracks. Within piles of reversed tape loop miasma and time-lag accumulation, Fossil Aerosol magnifies the grit, the errors, the bad splices, and the dropouts within their mesmerizing and hypnogogic studies of uncanny dislocations. Helen Scarsdale is honored and flattered to be working with Fossil Aerosol for their first solo vinyl release. The first 200 copies of the Helen Scarsdale edition will include fragments of 1970s intermission film, recovered from an abandoned drive-in theater during the early 1980s, affixed to the cover of the album." hear here

hear here also^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Finally, if you hadn't noticed, In A Moment… Ghost Box - a double-LP / double-CD compilation to to celebrate Ghost Box's 10th anniversary is out now. Sleeve notes by me. More information here.